


as we pass

by sharkfish (waitforspring)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Horror, Dark, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Horror, Implied Slash, M/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-06-04
Packaged: 2018-02-03 08:13:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1737584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waitforspring/pseuds/sharkfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>This close, he’s afraid it’s too late. He’s afraid of what he’ll find back at his makeshift home, a room that used to be a science classroom and is filled with the remnants of miniature labs, posters of the periodic tables on the wall. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>What he finds is Castiel, still alive. Cas, colored the same way a corpse is, those ghost circles around his eyes. Cas looks like a monster the same way cancer patients used to look like monsters, just the skeletal shell of someone who used to be a blinding presence. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	as we pass

She appears like an apparition out of the mist.

She is a monstrosity of her former self, now all garish talons and teeth, blood-stained and jagged like a saw, fetal bald wings at her shoulder blades.

Dean does not waste time wondering. He runs. He runs, a maniac being chased by a hungry beast through barren streets.

Her feet are loud. They make a strange squishing noise like the blacktop was mud, like they are changing shape even as she moves.

The air is thick and wet. It’s the kind that can make you wheeze even before you’ve really become winded, the kind to settle in your lungs and bring you death by pneumonia. It’s the way the mist never leaves, and it makes your brainwaves hazy and damp, too.

The sound of the mushy feet recedes behind him, enveloped in the fog, but Dean keeps running as long as he can, ducking from alley to alley in the hopes that the air will absorb his scent. He hasn’t met one with a nose like a bloodhound, not yet, but things are always changing and that could be his next surprise.

He bursts through the double-doored entrance of the school -- used to be school -- and his feet bring him into an anxious jog. This close, he’s afraid it’s too late. He’s afraid of what he’ll find back at his makeshift home, a room that used to be a science classroom and is filled with the remnants of miniature labs, posters of the periodic tables on the wall.

What he finds is Castiel, still alive. Cas, colored the same way a corpse is, those ghost circles around his eyes. Cas looks like a monster the same way cancer patients used to look like monsters, just the skeletal shell of someone who used to be a blinding presence.

“Cas,” Dean says. He is breathing hard.

Cas starts coughing. When he’s done there is blood on his sleeve. “You made it,” he says, like he might not ever say words again.

“I got a lot this time, even though -- well. One of them showed up while I was picking.”

Neither of them need to say it: this is not a good sign. The monsters are becoming immune to the redleaf, which means the redleaf might stop working on the monstrosity.

Castiel is too weak to chew a plant with the texture of sawdust, so Dean grinds it as quickly as he can and mixes it with a bit of water to create a gruel that will slide down Cas’s throat. Cas gulps it down, then lays back on the pile of blankets they call a bed, breathing shallowly.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You look better than yesterday.”

“Don’t lie.”

Dean sits next to Cas with a blanket wrapped around himself, trying to get rid of the damp chill that never really leaves.

Cas’s throat sounds less wrecked when he says, “You’ll have to leave me soon.”

“No. I’ll find more redleaf, and you’ll get better. Just like we talked about when you -- when you first --”

“Dean.” Castiel’s eyes can still be piercing. “I don’t want to hurt you. I couldn’t stand it. But if the teeth come in --”

“They haven’t yet. We’ve got plenty of time.”

“Promise me.”

“Don’t worry.” Dean forces a smile, and it might even be convincing. “I’ll go when I need to.”

 

Before the mist, they never would have been friends. They weren’t.

Castiel was a trust-fund kid mucking around in college until the money ran out, picking up as many degrees as he could on as little work as possible, waiting for daddy to call him in to take over as president of the family business, which involved long golf outings and cocktail hours.

Dean was a wunderkind -- he taught himself to read barely out of diapers and had his first BA in English with a focus on American Literature by 18. He read Wolff, Emerson, Mailer, and Morrison. He knew mid-century poetry the way people his age knew the lyrics to pop rap songs (it didn’t help that his only musical interests were in classic rock). His middle name was Whitney, and he privately pretended it was after Walt Whitman (not that anyone ever asked). He was on his way to a PhD by the time his peers finally declared a major, and wasn’t even 30 when he started teaching a full load at the university that gave him most of his degrees.

Castiel enrolled for “Young Adult Fiction and the Paranormal” because it looked like an easy A. The professor was young and a pretty big nerd despite his well-worn boots and he talked about the Harry Potter phenomenon with an alarming enthusiasm. Castiel figured he could watch the movies.

He was, of course, wrong -- Dean was an academic, not an idiot -- and they barely tolerated each other among a sea of female students wishing to be Tamora Pierce or wearing “Team Edward” shirts. Not that Dean tolerated the latter much better, but at least they took notes. Castiel just watched.

Then the fog came.

 

Now they are the only ones left, maybe in the whole world.

They sleep fitfully. Dean’s stomach growls, a hollow gong that wakes him periodically, and Castiel wakes up scratching at himself with bloodied fingernails. The changes in his skin itch with a ferocity he could not have predicted, like ants pushing their way out only to cover him again, a swarming mass of tiny feet and antennae.

The difference between the night and the day is the difference between profound blindness and sight through a thin cloth, all unsure shadows and tricks of dimension. They wake when it brightens and even Cas gets up to stand at the window and pull back the pseudo curtain.

“ _Why do we bother with the rest of day/the swale of the afternoon,/the sudden dip of the evening..._ something about the night with his many-pointed stars. I can’t remember anymore,” Dean says.

“There are a lot of things I can’t remember, either.”

Out of the mist, again as if an apparition: an adolescent, crawling on his hands and feet like a beast. His eyes have been clawed out and he mewls like a hungry bear cub, not quite grown into his deadliness. His skin trembles and bulges along his spine.

Cas and Dean watch it pass, hushed like at a graveside. When the monster has finally disappeared down the throat of the fog, Cas speaks. Still quiet, like there’s a part of him afraid the thing will hear and come crawling back, talons scrabbling against the window they breathe against. “I can go with you today.”

“You aren’t well.”

“I can walk.”

“Can you run?”

Cas tightens his belt to the last hole. “I feel pretty good after the red last night.”

It’s almost nice to walk, side by side, down the dirty street together. It is beyond silent, a modern ghost town, still and alien. Dean feels as if he is one of Connie Willis’s historians from the future.

“I would kill for a cigarette,” Cas says. “Isn’t that weird? I haven’t smoked since I was eighteen.”

“A joint,” Dean says.

Cas looks up at him in surprise, and Dean just laughs, and they smile at each other in a way that almost seems private. Funny, the things you learn about a person when you are the only two left.

Of course, it is that smile that does them in. The winged woman-thing comes at them with a screech. She goes for Dean (he wonders, numbly, if she remembers that he is the one who escaped her the day before) and his lungs constrict as if a piano has been dropped on them when he hits the pavement.

The monster is on him, ripping with claws and reaching with teeth. He kicks and shoves and fights, but she’s probably got him by a few pounds in weight and definitely in built-in weaponry. He is blinded by blood in his eyes; he hit his head when she tackled him.

He thinks, very clearly: _I am going to die here like Robert Neville with his vampires._

Castiel swings a pipe from a downed parking sign, the monster’s head an oversized baseball. Without the weight on his chest, Dean realizes he is screaming. He tries to clear his eyes and grapple to his feet at the same time. Cas is hitting the thing, over and over, creating a mush out of the distorted body.

“Cas! It’s dead!”

Cas drops the pole at last, chest heaving. He doesn’t look away from the body beneath him, blood all over his shoes and splattered across his face. “Are you ok?”

“I think so. Scratched up, maybe.”

“I need to sit down.”

Cas makes it just a few steps before nearly collapsing, but Dean’s there to catch him, taking most of Cas’s weight over his own shoulders. “Better get inside.”

The glass front of the shop is gone. They climb through the window stiffly and collapse behind the counter, out of sight. It takes a long time to catch their breath.

“Thank you,” Dean says. “That’s at least the second time you’ve saved my life.”

“What would you do without me?” Cas says, and starts coughing.

 

There is no more redleaf. Dean searches as far and wide as he can -- at first with Cas, and then without him, as the changes take more and more of his health -- and there’s nothing but the blasted blueleaf sneaking up between the sidewalk cracks. Just as bad, it seems there are more monsters than before, as if the death of the winged one has alerted them that there is fresh meat about.

Dean carefully pours water down Cas’s throat and sits with him through his feversleep spells. They last longer and longer, less and less time for Castiel to be awake and looking at Dean like salvation.

Dean wants more than anything to go back to a time when those eyes held nothing but disdain.

 

Cas finds a moment of lucidity, late at night when Dean should be getting his own rest. Cas’s skin has become something rawer, all spots and jutting tendons, nothing like the striking face that Dean was careful not to stare too long at during lectures. “It’s time, Dean.”

Dean pulls himself out of a waking doze. “No,” he says, “you’re still ok.” He smooths the hair back from Cas’s fevered forehead, just like his own mother did for him, a strange thing Dean had no memory of until just now. .

Cas begins to speak, but falls into another fit of coughing instead. This time he comes away with fresh blood and a few teeth in his hand. Jos moan is wordless and strangely human. Dean is sure he’s read something about it in one of those mid-century war novels he poured through for his thesis, that noise spurned by the realization that death has come to take you.

“I’m sorry I was shitty to you,” Cas says. His voice is a mumbled splash of bloody saliva and gums. “I could have learned something. About you.”

“It’s ok,” Dean says.

“Do you remember any poems?”

“Whitman.” A smile, the kind you make at a deathbed, wavery. “‘To a Stranger.’ _I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,/I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left--_ ”

Cas’s face turns into a sneer of pain, lips pulling away from his remaining teeth and eyes closing. “Oh, oh god,” he says, and then there are no words at all, just the wailing of a breaking and shifting jaw, the serrated shark teeth ripping through the gray of his gums.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Dean says, letting go of Cas’s hand, backing away. There should be tears but there aren’t any, just the mechanical movements, digging through his pile of blankets to find the revolver he stashed there a few days ago. There aren’t many bullets -- that’s why he hid it, because he knew he would have to save them for the right time. “I’m sorry.”

Cas jerks like an exorcism. Blood is everywhere, all down the front of his shirt, pouring from his mouth and nose and eyes, stigmata. His hands claw and stretch, muscles bulging.

Dean takes a shaking breath. He holds the gun with two hands. For all those war stories, he’s never shot one before. “I’m sorry,” he says, again, though Cas is too far gone now.

When Cas’s eyes open, they don’t belong to Cas at all. They stare at Dean with a terrible black hunger.

Cas is still scrabbling at the floor like his bones are melting, so despite the rabid dog in his eyes, Dean can hold the gun against his forehead without trouble.

In this echochamber of a building, the report is impossibly loud. Dean feels as if his eardrums have burst. There are spots of blood and brain and bone all over him, in his mouth. He stares at the monster missing half a head that used to be his friend.

Dean sits, abruptly. His hands are shaking so bad that the gun rattles staccato on the tile floor.

“ _I--I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or-- alone or when I wake at night alone--_ ” He presses his fist to his mouth, feeling sick. “ _I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again._ ”

The barrel goes between his lips, bumps the back of his throat. He can’t tell the difference between the taste of Cas’s blood and the metal. He thinks, _I am to see to it that I do not lose you,_ and then he pulls the trigger.

**Author's Note:**

> [really elegant sharkfish](http://reallyelegantsharkfish.tumblr.com/) on tumblr
> 
> Poems quoted are Billy Collins's "Morning" and Walt Whitman's "To a Stranger." I will confess to only learning who Billy Collins is for this fic. 
> 
> The Whitman piece makes me catch my breath every time, so here it is in its full glory: 
> 
> Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,  
> You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me, as of a dream,)  
> I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,  
> All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,  
> You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me,  
> I ate with you, and slept with you—your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only,  
> You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass—you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,  
> I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,  
> I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,  
> I am to see to it that I do not lose you.


End file.
